The Hindus (68 page)

Himalaya, who is regarded as the source of priceless gems, a king of mountains, disdains Shiva as Daksha had done (though for different reasons), and their fears turn out to be well founded. Shiva is a strange god, the epitome of the sort of person a man would not want his daughter to marry: He is a yogi who has vowed never to marry, he has a third eye in the middle of his forehead, he wanders around naked or wearing nothing but a loincloth woven of living snakes, he has no family, and he lives not in a house but in a cremation ground, smearing his body with the ashes of corpses. It is therefore not surprising that both his potential fathers-in-law object strenuously to him. In one Puranic version of the story, Shiva in disguise tells Parvati’s father, Himalaya: “Shiva is an old man, free from passion, a wanderer and a beggar, not at all suitable for Parvati to marry. Ask your wife and your relatives—ask anyone but Parvati.”
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The litany of undesirable qualities is a variant of the genre of “worship by insult” that is both a Tamil and a Sanskrit specialty, and that appears in its darker aspect when Daksha curses Shiva and then worships him for the same qualities for which he had cursed him. Redolent of virility and transgression, Shiva’s qualities cast their dark erotic spell on Parvati, as on his worshipers.

The marriage of Shiva and Parvati is celebrated in texts and in ritual hierogamies performed in temples and depicted in paintings and sculptures throughout India. Their marriage is a model of conjugal love, the divine prototype of human marriage, sanctifying the forces that carry on the human race. The marriages of other gods and goddesses too, often local couples celebrated only in one village, constitute a popular theme in temple art and literature, both courtly and vernacular. As in South India, the divine couple often served as a template for the images of kings and their queens who commissioned sculptures depicting, on one level, the god and his goddess, and on another, the king and his consort, or the queen and her consort.

The conflict between Shiva and Kama is only on the surface a conflict between opposites, between an antierotic ascetic power and an antiascetic erotic power. They are two sides of the same coin, two forms of heat, ascetic heat (
tapas
) and erotic heat (
kama
).
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For it is through his
tapas
that Shiva generates the power that he will use first for his perpetual tumescence and then to produce the seed of a spectacular child. Some variants of the myth express the connection between Kama and
tapas
through an additional episode that brings into this myth a figure that we have encountered before:

The fire is not just made of Shiva’s anger; it gained special power when it burned Kama, for it absorbed the heat of Kama too. The two fires released by Shiva and Kama meet and produce a fiery weapon of mass destruction that maintains a hair-trigger balance of mutual sublimation. (The
Mahabharata
says that Shiva himself is the mouth of the submarine mare, eating the waters [13.17.54].) But what is repressed must return, and the strain of
tapas
in the tradition is always poised to burst through in any monolithic construction of
kama
, just as
kama
constantly strains to burst out of extreme
tapas
. The three elements—Shiva’s anger, Kama’s passion, and the mare—are combined in a verse that Dushyanta, madly in love with Shakuntala, addresses to Kama, the verse cited at the start of this chapter. The balanced extremes implicit in this image are also evident from a Sanskrit aphorism about the two excesses (fire and flood) as well as one of the four addictive vices of lust: A king, no matter how physically powerful, should not drink too much, for the mare fire herself was rendered powerless to burn even a blade of grass, because she drank too much.
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The most serious problem in the marriage of Shiva and Parvati is the lack of any children born of both parents, a lack that is explicitly regarded as problematic by the gods on some occasions and by Parvati on others, but never by Shiva, who, despite his marriage, remains adamantly opposed to having children. Skanda, as we have seen, is born of Shiva alone, an event that triggers Parvati’s resentful curse that all the wives of the gods should be barren too. The widespread patriarchal belief that all goddesses are mother goddesses is contradicted by Parvati’s curse, as well as by Hindu mythology as a whole. In defiance of her own curse, Parvati in several texts begs Shiva to give her a child, but he never relents. She does
want
to be a mother; it is Shiva, and the gods, who keep her from being one. The closest she comes to motherhood is with Ganesha.

Many different stories are told about the birth of Ganesha, but one of the best known begins with Parvati taking a bath and longing for someone to keep Shiva from barging in on her, as was his habit. (This is yet another example of the
ritus interruptus
, the interruption of a sleeping, meditating, or conferring god or king or of an amorous couple or a bathing woman or goddess.) As she bathes, she kneads the dirt that she rubs off her body into the shape of a child, who comes to life. When Shiva sees the handsome young boy (or when the inauspicious planet Saturn glances at it, in some variants that attempt to absolve Shiva of the inverted Oedipal crime), the child’s head falls off; it is eventually replaced with the head of an elephant, sometimes losing part of one tusk along the way.
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Thus, just as Skanda is the child of Shiva alone, Ganesha is the child of Parvati alone—indeed a child born despite Shiva’s negative intervention at several crucial moments. Ganesha’s name means “Lord of the Common People” (
gana
meaning the “common people”) or “Lord of the Troops” (the
ganas
being the goblin hosts of Shiva, of whom Ganesha is the leader). He is the god of beginnings, always worshiped before any major enterprise, and the patron of intellectuals, scribes, and authors.

Parvati’s problematic relationship with her son Viraka (“Little Hero”), usually equated with Skanda, is narrated in several Puranas, of which the earliest is the
Matsya Purana
, dated to the Gupta age, though this passage may be later and is reproduced, with variations, in the still later
Padma
and
Skanda
Puranas:

The goddess Parvati sloughs her black outer sheath (the goddess Kali, often called Kaushika [“the Sheath”]) to reveal her golden inner form (Gauri). (This act of splitting apart reverses the act of coming together that creates the South India goddess from the head of one woman and the body of another.) In the end the golden Gauri, goddess of the breast, has the son, and the dark goddess Kali, very much a tooth goddess, has the toothy lion.

But the original Parvati, who contains both of the other two goddesses in her
in nuce
, is already a cruel mother. Not only does she ignore her son’s pitiful pleas as she goes away, abandoning him, but she even throws his words back in his face when she curses him, accusing him of abandoning
her
by failing to restrain his father’s sexuality. Viraka fails to recognize her when she returns, mistaking her for a non-Parvati (just as his father had mistaken the antigod for Parvati); his failure to recognize her seems to be superficial—she has changed the color of her skin—but it has deeper, darker overtones, for he believes his mother loves him, and this woman has cursed him (though he does not yet know it); indeed she has cursed him to have (another) unloving mother. The peeled-off goddess Kali is banished to the liminal area of the Vindhya Mountains (the southern region that composers of ancient Sanskrit texts in the north of India regarded as beyond the Hindu pale, the place to dump things that you did not want in the story anymore), and so she is called Vindhya-vasini (“She Who Lives in the Vindhyas”). (The myth may be reversing the historical process, for the goddess Kali may have come
from
the Vindhyas, or from the south in general, into Sanskrit culture.) The remaining golden form, the one that counteracted her son’s curse, becomes the female half of the androgyne.

Though Shiva and Parvati are depicted in both sculpture and painting together with Skanda or Ganesha or both, clearly this is not a Leave It to Beaver type of family: Each member is really a separate individual, with a separate prehistory and a separate role in Hindu worship. Nor are they joined together as members of a family usually are: Parvati does not bear the two children that are depicted with her, nor does Shiva father them in the normal way. The family represents, rather, the forces of the universe that humans must sometimes contend with, sometimes call on for help, though they are often clustered together in a group that presents the form, if not the function, of a family. The family is a way of grouping them together in an image that is “with qualities” (
sa-guna
), in this case, the qualities of a human family, while in their more commonly worshiped forms, they are not a family at all.

VEHICLES

Many Shaiva family portraits include the pets. Skanda has his peacock, Ganesha his bandicoot, Shiva his bull, and Parvati her lion. For this is another way, in addition to full-life avatars and periodic theophanies, in which the Hindu gods become present in our world. Most gods and goddesses (apart from the animal, or animal from the waist or neck down, or animal from the waist or neck up forms of the deities) are accompanied by a vehicle (
vahana
), an animal that serves the deity as a mount. In contrast with the Vedic gods who rode on animals you could ride on (Surya driving his fiery chariot horses, Indra on his elephant Airavata or driving his bay horses), the sectarian Hindu gods sit cross-legged on their animals or ride sidesaddle, with the animals under them presented in profile and the gods full face. Sometimes the animal merely stands beside the deity, both of them stationary.

The Vedic Indra also rode on the Garuda bird, which later became the mount of Vishnu. Garuda is sometimes represented as an eagle from the waist down or the neck up, otherwise anthropomorphic. Some South Indian Vishnu temples have a special landing post for Garuda to alight upon. Shiva’s vehicle is the bull Nandi, a symbol of Shiva’s masculine power and sexuality; the bull expresses something of the god’s own nature as well as his ambivalent relationship to that nature: As the greatest of all ascetics and yogis, Shiva “rides” his own virility in the sense that he controls, harnesses, and tames it. We have met Chandika’s lion, and the goddess Kali’s lion or tiger (which she sometimes lends to Parvati too). Skanda’s vehicle is the peacock, a brilliant choice that needs no explanation for anyone who has ever seen a general in full ceremonial dress, medals and all.

Even some of the half-animal deities have their own entirely animal vehicles: Ganesha’s vehicle is an Indian bandicoot or bandicoot rat, a large (six-pound) rodent (the name is derived from the Telugu word for “pig-rat,”
pandhikoku
), chosen for Ganesha not because elephants (or even elephant-headed, potbellied, anthropomorphic gods like Ganesha) are likely to canter about on rats, however big, but because rats, like elephants, can get through anything to get what they want, and Ganesha is the remover of obstacles. The bandicoot shares Ganesha’s nimbleness of wit, as well as his path-clearing abilities. The rat has now more recently become a mouse, with intellectual pretensions appropriate to Ganesha; there are modern representations of Ganesha in front of a computer with his bandicoot serving as the mouse.
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